The removal of small samples of suspicious tissue by way of a biopsy is an important medical diagnostic procedure. The tissue samples that are removed may be subjected to full pathological testing in a laboratory to determine the presence and/or the degree of a medical disorder. A needle biopsy is a biopsy procedure in which a hollow needle is inserted into tissue to remove one or more tissue samples or to extract fluids of interest. Needle biopsies are typically performed to provide samples for diagnosis of breast cancer, prostate cancer, kidney disease, and liver disorders including cirrhosis, hepatitis, and liver cancer, among many others.
In the diagnosis and treatment of cancer, for example, tumor tissue may be obtained for detailed pathological analysis by fine needle aspiration biopsy or by core needle biopsy. If the tumor can be felt, the biopsy needle may be guided to the tumor tissue by palpation. For non-palpable tumors, the biopsy needle is typically guided by x-ray imaging (stereotaxis) or by ultrasound imaging (sonography). These conventional approaches to guiding biopsy needles, however, often yield tissue other than the tissue of interest, thereby leading to misdiagnosis or necessitating additional procedures.
Improvements in the accuracy of biopsy procedures would be beneficial, as the quality of the tissue samples analyzed can have significant effects on the accuracy of the diagnosis and the efficacy of the subsequent treatment. It would be desirable to provide a system for guiding a biopsy needle that could rapidly and accurately distinguish between different types of tissue. It would also be desirable to provide a system for guiding a biopsy needle that could distinguish between different pathologies.